A Blog Dedicated to Mind, Body, Spirit, and Healing

Beauty in the Broken

Sometimes life breaks us. We put so much effort into our careers, our relationships, our marriages, our education, that when they fail, as we know they sometimes do, we can feel that all that effort was a waste. All the former beauty of something cherished is now gone. But, through every struggle we face we must find a way to go on. We must find ways to repair what has broken. However, there is more opportunity in reparation, than just rebuilding…

There’s a 500 year old Japanese art form known as kintsukuroi, or kintsugi, of repairing broken pottery. A masterful artist takes the shards of ceramic and puts them back together again filling each crack with gold. This practice portrays this healing I know we can experience.

Through some way or another, life breaks beautifully crafted ceramics, in the same way that life sometimes breaks us. Instead of deserting these broken ceramics, artists take those broken pieces, those cracks, to make the ceramic even more precious, revered, and beautiful than it ever had been before. Gold fills all the broken pieces.

In the end, it becomes more beautiful for being broken.

It is the same for us as people. Our brokenness, our vulnerability and our resilience, our times of pain and finding joy through that pain, is what makes us beautiful.

We have the power to take all our broken pieces and cracks and fill them with gold. Fill your losses with new relationships and hobbies and skills. Don’t let feeling broken leave you in pieces. For when life crashes into us, we can break and we do break, but we always have the ability to persevere and rebuild even stronger and more beautiful than before.

“To be human is to be broken and broken is its own kind of beautiful.” ~R.M. Drake